MountainMornings

I’ve had enough of the General failures – old men and their sexual peccadillos. Hamas and Gaza are in the news this morning. Could the fragile MidEast peace crumble; what would it look like, to have Israel and Palestine peacefully co-exist? I’m becoming more and more of a pacifist, deploring war of any kind and for any reason. I’ve followed the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt via Facebook. But yesterday comments turned ugly, anti-semitic diatribes quoting wikipedia articles about which tribe actually owns their sacred land. Luckily, this morning by way of an Atlantic article, I found a different Facebook page, “Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself.”
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Teach-me-how-to-drive-so-I-can-protect-myself/132205866854879?ref=ts&fref=ts

A 32 year old IT consultant, Manal al-Sharif, started this page after deciding she should be able to drive a car around her home country of Saudi Arabia. She posted a video of herself ranting away while driving about the utter ridiculousness of this ban on women drivers. She was arrested, then released. Her Facebook page had 12,000 fans, and now it has 8,019 – hmmm, I wonder who’s been censoring her readership? Although well educated women in Saudi Arabia are not finding any jobs, simply because of their gender, female lawyers have recently been allowed to practice in the kingdom. Change is coming, just not fast enough for some.
http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/20/saudi-princess-opens-up-about-womens-right-in-saudi-arabia/

Here is a video about the freedom project in the Arab world. It is poignant, it is timely and it asks us to think about what choices we might have if we were born in Japan, or Mexico. The arbitrary nature of life on earth; we sometimes forget how our opinions have been formed over years of culture and family like a smooth stone. When old men send the young to war, over boundaries, over religion, over oil, what if we were all to stand strong and say, “No.” This is the existential crisis of our time. We women need to drive that conversation.